As 2025 comes to a close, we are reveling in being back home in our own boatshop. We’ll be teaching an increasing number of courses here, just steps away from our cozy home. But there’ll still be a few remote courses. Keep your eyes on the McKenzie River Discovery Center, where we will be teaching in July, and WoodenBoat School where Cricket and Glade will be teaching two courses in August. Registration opens January 2, so click here if you want in! And look! Our 2025 WoodenBoat baby is the cover girl!

But as I said, we plan to be home at Fretwater Boatworks more and more as time passes. We kicked off the winter season with a rebuild of Peace River’s stern. We’d done a lot of work on this 1972 Briggs over the years, but had not gotten around to fixing her seriously crooked stern. We told Bill, her caretaker, if he ever wrecked her, crash the stern. And he did, down below Crystal Rapid in Grand Canyon.

Somehow in one of her stern rebuilds up in Idaho, long ago, the stern was rebuilt with one side an inch above the other, and the other side an inch further back than the former. Most troubling to look at. But Bill began the process. So: step one: rip it off.

Lay up a new transom.

Lower the high sheer line on the left, and bring the transom in one inch on the right.

That’s so much better. Then restore the removable transom for motoring across reservoirs and upriver runs. Repaint her.

And she’s ready for her next adventure. We think we heard Peace River sigh in relief.

Our first course under our new LLC designation began in mid-December: Building the open Chub. Here’s Cricket explaining lofting–the foundation of every course we teach.

Bec’s first ever use of a power tool: grinding a 10:1 scarf with a 7″ grinder. You go!

Gluing up the floor.

With the hull together, we install seats and floorboards.

Day five and she’s a big beautiful boat. Bec won the drawing for the boat! Woohoo!

We celebrated that evening with a Holi-Dories party at Snow Mountain River, and presented the Arizona debut of Randy Dersham’s award-winning documentary on the evolution of the drift boat and its offspring, the Grand Canyon Dory. If you haven’t seen Oregon’s Boat, try to catch it whenever it shows near you.

Back in the shop we accepted the challenge of putting new wooden gunwales on Vidal’s fiberglass hull. We had to rethink how we do it, hollowing out the outwales and part of the gunwale blocks and inwales to capture the top edge of the fiberglass. Then we assembled it from the outside in. And it worked!

For the last few days of the year we’ve been working on our latest invention–the McKenziac. Like the Doryak, which is based on the Briggs Grand Canyon Dory, this is a scaled down version of Woodie Hindman’s McKenzie River Drift Boat, proportionally shorter and wider. We hope to build a fleet of them for teaching on-river rowing courses. Stay tuned. We’re naming them after early McKenzie boat pioneers. This one is Torkel, for Torkel Kaarhus.

The seat box is removable, so we can stack McKenziacs five-high for transport.

And here are Veltie and Prince:

Our next course here in the shop will be Building the Doryak, in mid-February. It booked instantly with a waiting list. We’ll resume classes in the fall. Check here for announcements.

Happy New Year, y’all! We hope to see you on the river or in the boatshop! (Thanks, Taylor Miller, for this family portrait!)